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It is said that on wintry primary election nights, if you stand in a sensible Republican bathroom at the Witching Hour with a candle in hand, slowly turning in circles while playing the video below on your laptop, Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, may appear in the mirror. Read More
It’s too much to say that we all should have seen last week’s Republican upset in Massachusetts coming. Not even the Republicans themselves thought they had a chance in the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat until about 10 days out.But we should have known, long before the polls showed a last-minute surge of Read More
A year after his sweeping election victory - and ten months after he was inaugurated amid widespread public optimism - the new president's support is slipping in the polls, faith in his policies is vanishing, and the opposition is smelling blood.
That sentence could aptly describe the political outlook that Barack Obama faces as the Read More
So George H.W. Bush used an interview with CBS News last Friday to decry the lack of civility in modern politics and to brand Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow "sick puppies."
"The way they treat my son and anyone who's opposed to their point of view is just horrible," the former president said Read More
From the moment Barack Obama cleared 270 electoral votes on election night last November, this moment was inevitable: Nine months into his presidency, Republicans are ratcheting up the comparisons between 2010 and 1994 and the media is starting to ask, ‘What if?’
In a story in Sunday’s New York Times, Representative Read More
Near the top of his latest prime-time news conference, President Obama acknowledged that “Congress is still working through a few key issues” as it seeks to produce a unified health care plan.
That meant that there wasn’t any specific proposal for Obama to point to and rally support for. We still don’t Read More
High unemployment is the domestic equivalent of an unpopular war--an overpowering drain on presidential popularity that can’t be countered with policy achievements in other areas, personal charm, or any other conventional political weapon. Barack Obama may soon offer the latest affirmation of this.
A few weeks ago came news that the unemployment rate Read More
Flummoxed by Ronald Reagan’s enduring popularity in the face of a string of unsettling foreign and domestic developments, Pat Schroeder, then a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, took to the House floor in 1983 and said of the first-term president: “He has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency: He sees to it that nothing sticks to Read More
Jack Kemp's death over the weekend has produced a flood of news stories about his life and political career. From a purely political standpoint, though, one lesson from Kemp's career stands out: It really matters who a presidential candidate picks for a running mate.
Yes, vice presidents are a heartbeat away from the presidency, Read More
It's easy to brand Arlen Specter's decision to leave the Republican Party—a move directly precipitated by his realization that his career would end with next year's Pennsylvania Senate primary unless he left the G.O.P.—a nakedly unprincipled act of political survival.
And that's just what Specter's critics, on the right, on the left, and in the Read More
Few aspects of American politics are as ridiculous and dangerous as the right-wing urge to substitute macho posturing for foreign policy. That irrepressible habit surfaces constantly now that President Obama is in the Oval Office, most recently when he shook hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas, a smiling moment Read More
It's easy enough to ridicule Wednesday's "tea party" protests as a top-down partisan propaganda effort unconvincingly dressed up as an organic grass-roots outpouring.
And it's just as easy to mock the Republican partisans who organized and hyped the protests for their irrational hypocrisy: These are the same folks who lionize Ronald Reagan (under Read More
As Barack Obama’s economic advisers confront choices that vary from bad to worse in their mission to revive the financial sector and the broader economy, it is worth remembering that those were choices inherited by the president, who is still new to his office. Listening to his critics, especially on the right, it would be Read More
Barack Obama will stand for re-election in 2012, while the 254 Democrats in the House of Representatives will next face the voters in 2010. There will be friction.
For House Democrats, whose ’10 campaigns will succeed or fail based on the public’s confidence in Obama, it’s essential that voters feel the economy is Read More
If a doctor can’t accurately diagnose what’s wrong with his patient, then the treatment he prescribes is doomed to fail. Republicans tempted to heed Rush Limbaugh’s advice on how to return to power ought to keep this in mind.
According to Limbaugh, who spent about an hour fulminating against assorted villains from “the Read More
